Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751152AbVKNPbG (ORCPT ); Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:31:06 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751153AbVKNPbG (ORCPT ); Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:31:06 -0500 Received: from cpu1185.adsl.bellglobal.com ([207.236.110.166]:30644 "EHLO mail.rtr.ca") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751152AbVKNPbF (ORCPT ); Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:31:05 -0500 Message-ID: <4378ADB2.7040905@rtr.ca> Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:30:58 -0500 From: Mark Lord User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051013 Debian/1.7.12-1ubuntu1 X-Accept-Language: en, en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linux Kernel Subject: 2.6.xx: dirty pages never being sync'd to disk? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1093 Lines: 25 Okay, this one's been nagging me since I first began using 2.6.xx. My Notebook computer has 2GB of RAM, and the 2.6.xx kernel seems quite happy to leave hundreds of MB of dirty unsync'd pages laying around more or less indefinitely. This worries me, because that's a lot of data to lose should the kernel crash (which it has once quite recently) or the battery die. /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000 (30 seconds) /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500 (5 seconds) My understanding (please correct if wrong) is that this means that any (file data) page which is dirtied, should get flushed back to disk after 30 seconds or so. That doesn't happen here. Hundreds of MB of dirty pages just hang around indefinitely, until I manually type "sync", at which point the hard drive gets very busy for 20 seconds or so. What's going on? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/